Holes (2003)

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Most of the books I treasured as a child I
still enjoy reading as an adult. Louis Sachar’s Holes is one of the few
children’s books I’ve read as an adult that made me wish I’d been
able to read it as a kid. Wry humor, thrills, and vividly bizarre
details figure in a convoluted, almost epic plot in which
seemingly unrelated elements are cleverly dovetailed into a
satisfying, redemptive climax that takes on a weight of
destiny.

All of this is effectively brought to the screen by director
Andrew Davis (The Fugitive)
and Sachar, who adapted his own book. A few things are lost in
translation, naturally. Young Stanley Yelnats, who in the book
was overweight and dorky, is played in the film by photogenic
Shia LaBeouf ("Even Stevens"). And a few of the book’s twists and
surprises are either telegraphed or dropped altogether.

Yet Holes manages that rare trick of faithfully evoking
what was special about the book without becoming slavish or
by-the-numbers. Davis captures the book’s blend of coming-of-age
realism, tongue-in-cheek grotesquerie, fantasy, and adventure,
and capably navigates the plot’s multiple timelines and
settlings. Solid art direction and cinematography convincingly
plant the story in the middle of a Texas dust bowl, and the
well-cast ensemble ably brings the characters to life.

LaBeouf makes a sympathetic, underdog hero as the boy who has
the bad luck — or is it an old family curse, or perhaps something
more? — to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, winding up
convicted of stealing a valuable pair of sneakers and consigned
to reform camp. Little Khleo Thomas (Friday After Next) is
self-possessed and guileless as Zero, the camp resident with the
slowest tongue and the fastest shovel.

Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, and Tim Blake Nelson strike the
right notes of cartoonish menace as the camp’s villainous adult
supervisors, while Henry Winkler, Siobhan Fallon, and Nathan
Davis bring an endearing quirkiness to Stanley’s appealingly
eccentric family. In the sequences set in the past, Patricia
Arquette and Dule Hill are sweetly appealing as a high-minded
schoolmarm and a sunny handyman who mends her schoolhouse and
breaks her heart through no fault of his own, while Eartha Kitt
is effectively spooky as Madame Zeroni, a Latvian fortuneteller
who pronounces a curse on a young swain for neglecting a promise
to her.

Precisely how a story about a pair of stolen sneakers and
juvenile delinquents digging holes in the hot Texas sun
eventually encompasses a tragic frontier romance in the Old West,
a nineteenth-century Latvian curse, a dried-up lake where no drop
of rain has fallen since a murder was committed more than a
century ago, a legendary female bank robber, deadly
yellow-spotted lizards, rattlesnake-venom nail polish, and a
formula for eliminating foot odor is a discovery, or rather
series of discoveries, that are among the pleasures of watching
Holes.

Another pleasure comes from discovering how, despite what
seems like Stanley’s abyssmal luck, or perhaps his family really
is cursed, there’s a deeper benevolence at work in his story.
Somehow or other, the universe, or perhaps it is Providence, is
looking out for him.

When the stolen sneakers seem to fall out of the sky on him,
setting him on the path to the cruelly misnamed Camp Green Lake,
it seems like a cosmic practical joke. But there’s a larger fate
at work, and we see that chances at redemption often come about
in surprising ways; and if there are curses, they can eventually
be broken. (In the book, a certain circumstance is directly
implied to be an act of divine judgment, and by inference a later
change in circumstances seems to be divine mercy or lifting of a
punishment. The film doesn’t make this explicit, but it plays out
the same way.)

With its Chinese puzzle-box of a plot, Holes is easily
one of Hollywood’s most challenging and intellectually engaging
family films in recent years. Davis and Sachar deserve credit for
refusing to dumb down the story and delivering a film that will
reward repeated viewing.